Oh Boy
Posted in Popular Song, Rock on Feb 3rd, 2009 No Comments »
Buddy Holly died fifty years ago today. He was twenty two years old. He had come over to England the year previous and I remember seeing him on TV, with the Crickets, on the family variety performance show ‘Sunday Night at the London Palladium’. He sang ‘Oh Boy’.
Shortly afterwards I bought my first vinyl LP, ‘The Buddy Holly Story’ on the Coral Record label. I have it here before me. The cover is held together with cellotape, but the record itself is still playable, despite the battering it had over the years on my old Dansette record player.
Buddy Holly was among the first rock’n'roll stars to write their own songs - another was Eddie Cochran, who also died tragically young. Holly’s songs were disarmingly simple - often consisting of no more than three simple chords. But his example - a young man writing songs for people his own age, which they could relate to - gave a lot of singers who came after him the courage to do the same. Lennon and McCartney above all.
In Memoriam.
